Montreal artist Julie Trudel is the winner of the $25,000 Joseph Plaskett Award.
The annual award was created in 2004 by senior Canadian painter Joseph Plaskett to recognize Canadian MFA students or recent grads specializing in painting and to generally encourage the maintenance of painting and drawing as an art form. Each recipient is required to spend a year abroad living, studying and working in this medium.
Trudel, who graduated from UQAM with her MFA in 2012, is planning to use the award to live and work in Europe and Berlin in 2014.
The jury, comprised of artists Renée Van Halm, Ben Reeves and Robert Youds, praised Trudel’s “intense and innovative approach to abstraction in painting” that investigates “mechanical colour reproduction systems that she manually applies to variously shaped panels.”
Youds also said that Trudel’s work stood out because “1) The recipient’s work has the appearance of extending abstract painting from a generalized vernacular into a form of specifics that involves not only the use of her own hand, but perhaps speaks towards systems of reproduction in general (both mechanical and digital). I think this double-play affords the work something quite unique, and yet timely. 2) Her work owes a certain debt to earlier (particularly Quebec) abstraction—but it is not held back, nor is it simply mimicking past histories.”
Trudel was a runner-up for the Plaskett Award in 2012 and was also a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2011 and 2012.
